The visual structure of Animated Collaboration

Animation Collaboration is a celebration of play and creativity. Every year we do an international project with other workshops around the world working with a common theme. Kids in countries all over the globe undertake the same process – accepting the theme, taking the tools, brainstorming ideas, designing and telling visual stories with move-click-move frame-by-frame under the camera animation. Through this activity, we experience focused creative play. And there is spontaneous glee when we actually see our objects come to life.

Our video art piece is like the seasons, in four parts.

1. Kids eagerly receive the tools, passed to them from instructors

2. They accept the global challenge

3. Generating a pool of ideas, they write a story and express it in short animations

4. Through all of this, they experience creative play, and the joy of seeing things come to life.

Last year’s theme for the global collaboration was color and our color was YELLOW! Working with students at North Park Montessori, they designed and animated these sequences.

By not using dialogue or English words, our animation can communicate the ideas across borders, across ages.

In our piece, we have included clips from other countries, too. Whenever we used student clips, we placed them on a diagonal, to separate them from the work our team made in creating the framework animation.

As teachers, we facilitate the creative play of our students. We wanted to play, too! That is one reason we chose to create the framework animation, and to share it with others at ArtPrize!